Marketers Need Quality Convenience

American convenience stores turned 60 this year, which seems…young. In fact, the modern concept of convenience is more recent than you’d think, and advertisements promoting quick-and-easy options wasn’t the norm until the 1950s.?

But while everyone loves convenience, we all know that quality is often sacrificed in the process—stale chips and mystery meat won’t be making an appearance in Michelin Star restaurants any time soon.

This fear of losing out on quality is why marketers can be wary of speedy solutions that seem too good to be true; no one wants junk-food level content for their customers. Time-strapped marketers want to create messaging that’s just as engaging and personalized as ever, without sacrificing quality—and that’s what this newsletter is all about.

Read on to learn how you can expertly use templates, maximize creative assets, and render content on mobile efficiently. Most importantly, you’ll also get a peek at Chevrolet’s TikTok documentary in this month’s Marketing Moments.?

What Do Cookie Cutters and Emails Have in Common?

If you answered “templates,” you’re correct! More than half of marketers use a consistent framework for all of their messaging, greatly reducing the time-to-market for each email. A cookie-cutter approach may not sound like the best way to jazz up your emails, but no longer running on a cocktail of stress and caffeine isn’t the only benefit to templates.

Templates don’t just speed up your workflow, they can act as the formula to successful engagement with every send, especially if you keep these three steps in mind.?

Stick to the Script

Picture this: you’ve got a team of email marketers with a fabulous campaign in mind. They come back with the creative draft, but it’s not what you envisioned. It’s got the right branded colors, but it still doesn’t look like a message from your brand. And on top of that, it took your creative team a lot of time and resources to create the individual animations and artwork.

This is where a template comes in handy. By maintaining a constant wireframe, you actually gain the ability to innovate and push the envelope with your content without losing sight of how you want your brand to be present within the inbox.

Don’t Forget to Improv

Templates have the power to create incredible emails, but if they’re only wielded for generic campaigns that every customer and their mother receives, the main ingredient is missing from this formula to success.

A template can only power personalization and maintain an on-brand voice simultaneously if it’s built from dynamic modules. Dynamic modules, simply put, allow you to slot in data-driven content that will automatically adapt to the customer. For example, if your template has a hero image, a product grid, and a discount offer, every customer will receive all three; but what’s in each of those modules will change based on the customer’s unique preferences and history.

This is mission-critical, because a dynamic template means that you can still push wider business goals, but make each offer far more enticing through personalization.?

Co-Write the Lines

A pipeline of real-time, behavioral customer data is gold for powering dynamic modules. But only looking at the interests customers have already indicated is half the battle. For a true gold rush of engagement through your templates, letting AI “co-design” the content is the final step.

Despite some of the not-so-encouraging AI headlines, don’t skip this step! This isn’t about using open-source, rogue AI that will turn your emails into wildly off-brand messages. It’s about using AI that exclusively leverages your data and no one else’s to populate each module with content that encourages them to explore other product categories. It’s the perfect pairing with the BAU reinforcement plays marketers are familiar with.

Looking for more top-tier template tips? Get a deeper dive with the eBook below.

Save Those Creative Juices

Unfortunately, templates don’t solve all of your time-saving woes. One of the most costly and time-consuming tasks of them all is wrangling the A-list celebrity of the email: the hero image.

Organizing, shooting, and editing these images is a whole production on its own, but as email marketers, our job is to make the most of each of these investments. That doesn’t just mean making the biggest splash possible with your summer campaign, though that’s included. It’s making sure that those pricey creative assets aren’t one-and-done images that hit the trash right after their one moment of glory. Instead of the fast-fashion approach to creatives, we’re going for the timeless capsule wardrobe.

How to do that? Keep your repository of creative assets on hand, and rather than manually slotting them into different campaigns, let AI select the most relevant choice for each customer. The AI can take into account who opened what emails, who engaged, and other key information to determine which customers would react best to a resend and who needs something totally fresh. On top of that, if the output isn’t quite what you want, marketers keep the reins on editing rights and approving any content.?

With this approach, not only is personalization prioritized to entice customers to act, but each creative can be reused far more often than they could otherwise. The end result? Saving time, resources, and creating a better output than you could without AI automation.

This Testimonial Is Music to Our Ears

Former NFL player turned digital marketer Matt Kopa (Head of Product Marketing) sat down with Movable Ink to share how his team at Amazon Music has expertly scaled engaging content for every listener.

By honing in on Movable Ink’s automated personalization, the team drove stellar engagement, ultimately deepening the special connection between audiences and their favorite artists and creators.

The Old Marketer Can’t Come to the Phone Right Now

Marketers that replicate their work every time they build out an omni-channel campaign? That approach is out, as your mobile messaging demands the same level of efficiency as your newfound AI-powered, templated emails. Don’t recreate the wheel every time you launch a mobile campaign by incorporating these quick fixes:

Don’t Gatekeep Your Data

Don’t get it twisted; your customers’ data is off-limits to anyone they haven’t explicitly given it to. But if customers have already chosen to share information with your brand, their data should be accessible at every point in your tech stack. Instead of wasting hours of time hunting for the right data set, tools like automated APIs and unified integrations should be populating it for you.

Copy and Paste

With universally accessible data comes easily displaying your best email content on mobile. While this automatic replication is a win, don’t stop there—be sure to loop in mobile-specific data, such as loyalty information that customers are often looking for in-app.

Pass the Variable Test?

Ensuring your message renders correctly on every device is a time-consuming but necessary process. Images that look beautiful in email are squished on mobile, and dark mode proves to be a battle for every email marketer. Again, this is why dynamic templates are so important. When modules can be automatically updated with fresh data, marketers can easily change their content without re-coding from scratch.

Customers Are Clicking In

Looking to boost engagement? If so, this is the webinar for you, as our speakers will be sharing how hotel giant Best Western expertly drives clicks, conversions, and revenue. Register below!

Marketing Moments to Watch ??

Chevy’s “Office” Docu-Drama: We don’t normally give awards for our marketing moments, but if we could, this one would win first prize—for the year. Binge-watch the entire saga before the system is down.

Lindsay Lohan Spills the Tea: It must be the early 2000s, because Lindsay Lohan is taking screens by storm once again. Including a speech with a Mean Girls level of inspiration, see how Pure Leaf nailed this one.

It’s a BRATZ Summer: 2023 was all about Barbie pink, but 2024 is locked in on Bratz “alwayz.” Get the scoop on the doll that’s dominating your TikTok this summer.

Drive-Thru Pit Stop: Fast food lanes feeling a little slow? Maybe you just need an F1 racer to speed things up. See how Canadian pillar Tim Hortons won the race with this fabulous ad.??